Chapter 7

A TURNED-UP NOSE IS WORSE THAN HAIL

AS MANY AS NINE MILLION SOUTHERNERS FLED ITALY BETWEEN 1871 and 1951. Nine million. A crowd bigger than the population of New York City.

Most of them were dirt poor.

And some of them were criminals.

A congressional study started in 1907 drew a link between the high crime rates in Southern Italy and immigration numbers. The authors of the study claimed that as the emigrants left the South, the crime rates in those parts of Italy dropped substantially. “Certain kinds of criminality are inherent in the Italian race,” the report concluded in 1911. “In the popular mind, crimes of personal violence, robbery, blackmail, and extortion are peculiar to the people of Italy.”

Was Vita one of those criminals? Was Matera happy to see her go?

Vita’s sons, Valente and Leonardo, would become upstanding citizens in Jersey City. Had the criminal gene skipped a generation?

Grandpa Beansie, Leonardo’s son, was by far the biggest and baddest character in the Rogues’ Gallery that was my family album. As a kid, he stole a crate of beans off the back of a truck—hence the nickname. But that was just his first crime. He was a career criminal who stole, beat people up, and even murdered a guy once during a fight. Ma said Grandpa did it with his bare hands, that he beat the guy so badly that he eventually died.

There were tales about Beansie’s siblings, particularly his sister, Aunt Katie. She worked for the corrupt administration of Jersey City mayor Frank Hague, “getting the vote out,” which usually involved either bribes or beatings. But there were so many stories about Katie, I couldn’t even keep track of them all.

My favorite was the one about her rigging the St. Mary’s parish bingo game with the help of her son, my cousin Mike, who was blessed with a photographic memory. He would memorize the bingo boards of the women who paid Katie a kickback before the game started. He would whisper the “winning numbers” to his mother. Katie would then call out the fake winning numbers to reward the women who had paid their tribute. She made a killing every week.

Cousin Mike later went to Harvard Law School, where he studied beside Antonin Scalia. Instead of a chief justice, Mike became a mob consigliere.

His brother, my cousin Chubby, had the dubious distinction of being Jersey City’s first heroin addict. He stole to support his habit. One time he knocked on our apartment door and tried to sell my mother a pot roast from Aunt Katie’s freezer.

I had witnessed firsthand the petty crimes that my Polish father committed each day. He stole frozen food—sometimes lobsters and steaks—from the warehouse where he worked near the mouth of the Holland Tunnel in order to feed us at home.

Burglars and bookies, killers and con men filled the Polish, Italian, and Russian sides of my family. But sad to say, most of the criminals came from the Vena side, the Italian side. I hated to admit it, but it was true. Overwhelmingly so.

The name Vena can be translated a number of ways. It can mean mood, either good or bad. Or it can mean streak, as in having a lucky streak or a wild streak. Vena poetica means having a turn for poetry. But Vena’s main meaning is vein, as in a vein that runs through a family, a trait passed down from one generation to the next. In our case, a penchant for crime.

CESARE LOMBROSO’S THEORIES WERE RACIST, REPUGNANT, AND crazy. He claimed, for instance, that the reason Southern Italians were more likely to be murderers than their brethren in the north was the heavy concentration of African and Asian blood in their veins. But I couldn’t help reading every word he wrote, since those words were written around the same time Vita and Francesco were committing their own crime.

I stumbled upon the work of Lombroso, a nineteenth-century Italian doctor, while doing research at the New York Public Library. He had studied seven thousand different cases, many of them Southern Italian criminals and brigands, and developed a detailed theory on what a typical criminal looked like. According to him, criminals were throwbacks to more primitive savages and apes. And he believed that criminal behavior was inherited.

Lombroso forged his theory while working as a doctor at an asylum in northern Italy. As he was performing an autopsy on a criminal named Vilella, Italy’s version of Jack the Ripper, Lombroso came across a small hollow at the base of his skull, which was not found in normal specimens, and an enlarged spinal cord near the same spot, which was typical in lower primates. He claimed to find it in other criminals as well and so began his life’s work.

Lombroso’s research, though embraced in the United States, was eventually debunked in most of Europe. His work gave me insight into the incredible ignorance and mind-set of that time and place. But mostly, I thought one of my relatives might pop up in one of his illustrated studies.

Since I didn’t know what Francesco looked like, and had very little to go on with Vita, I substituted their physical characteristics with Lombroso’s descriptions of the natural-born criminal, using his books as if they were a family album.

Typical criminals were short in stature and usually skinny, with several of these traits:

             an asymmetrical face

             a large, jutting jaw with strong canine teeth

             high cheekbones

             deep, arched eye orbits with drooping eyelids

             handle-shaped ears that stuck out (like a chimp’s)

             apelike long arms

             an elongated big toe

             a hairy body but a lack of much facial hair (except in female criminals, who tended to have mustaches and beards)

             either an extremely large head or an unusually small head, with a lined forehead and lots of wrinkles

             dark hair (rarely bald or with gray hair)

             bushy eyebrows

             thin lips

             missing or extra ribs

             extra nipples in men, and flabby breasts in women

The nose varied depending on the crime. Murderers tended to have flat noses, whereas thieves had birdlike noses that often pointed up. Turned-up noses were so typical of criminals in Italy that there was a saying that went: “Naso che guarda in testa è peggior che la tempesta,” which translated as “A turned-up nose is worse than hail.” Hail being the archenemy of farm owners.

Criminals were also more likely than the general population to be left-handed.

My family had a large contingent of southpaws, including Grandpa Beansie, who was forced by his teacher to write with his right hand as a child. They would scold and beat him if he tried to write with his left hand. (The Italians called the left sinistra, a Latin word that by the Middle Ages had come to mean evil or sinister.)

Forcing a little kid to write with his right hand when he was really left-handed could lead to learning disabilities and, of course, terrible frustration. It seemed cruel and could likely drive a normally precocious kid over the edge. Beansie was held back in school several times and finally dropped out at thirteen.

He also suffered a head injury as a child when he was hit by one of the only cars in Jersey City. My relatives were convinced the accident left him bipolar, which might explain his violent outbursts. Ma had tons of excuses for why her father turned out the way he did. But my favorite excuse was the one about him being a twin, conceived separately, and his mother giving birth to a dead baby a month before Beansie was born. When Beansie finally was born, his mother was so depressed about losing that other baby that she was unable to breastfeed him. So Beansie was suckled by his Zia Maria, Valente’s wife, a kind woman to whom he stayed attached for years.

Ma claimed that all that formative psycho baby trauma had caused Beansie to become the criminal and murderer that he would become. Separation anxiety from his twin and separation anxiety from his cold, depressed mother had both taken their toll and made him no good. I worried he was simply born that way, the murderous gene passed down from our ancestors.

LOMBROSO MEASURED HEAD SIZE AND ARM LENGTH AND TOOK DETAILED notes on other physical attributes to prove that criminal character was indeed inherited. He found criminals had worse hearing, sense of smell, and taste. Their eyesight was more acute than the average Joe, though they tended to be color-blind and their field of vision more limited.

Criminals were incredibly lazy, Lombroso said, and would rather starve than put in a good day’s work. They were reckless and often sloppy in their handiwork, leaving bloody weapons lying around, or in some extreme cases, even tattooing their criminal exploits on their bodies.

They loved tattoos and were much more likely to be tattooed than the normal person. They also were big drinkers and were often violent when drunk.

Lombroso also found that natural-born criminals had the uncanny ability to heal their wounds more quickly than the average person. One case involved a man who ripped out his mustache, including a big chunk of skin, only to have it heal a few days later. Lombroso thought that maybe this was some throwback in evolution. Criminals were like salamanders and lizards who were able to regrow tails and other body parts.

When I read that, I cringed. Doctors in Jersey City had marveled at the speed with which my Italian relatives healed. Beansie, for instance, would be beaten by the cops on a regular basis, but within a day or two his bruises and cuts would miraculously disappear. His sisters were known to heal extremely quickly as well. And my mob consigliere cousin Mike—he of the bingo game fix—recuperated so fast from open heart surgery that his doctors were astounded. He hardly even had a trace of the incision on his chest.

The ability to heal his wounds quickly was only one of many Lombrosian criminal traits Grandpa Beansie possessed. The laziness and refusal to work, the perfect eyesight, the tattoos and violent alcoholism described Beansie to a tee. He also had thin lips and very little facial hair, and was pretty short.

In Lombroso’s books were photos of his various patients, whose faces I scanned for any family resemblance whatsoever. I knew Vita was supposed to have had an underbite, so the enlarged-jaw theory worried me right off the bat. Lombroso claimed that nearly half the criminals he studied had a jaw that jutted out beyond the forehead.

Women, when they turned to murder, could be much more vicious than men, Lombroso claimed. The female brigand, Ciclope, chastised her partner for murdering his victims too quickly. And a subject by the name of Rulfi killed her niece by stabbing her with long pins.

But women rarely became criminals, Lombroso said. He believed the equivalent to criminal behavior in women was prostitution.

The most common form of murder for women was infanticide, rampant in Southern Italy. Women with no means of feeding another child, and without access to abortion, sometimes smothered a newborn rather than watch it die a slow, painful death from hunger and disease.

I hoped the family murder in Italy didn’t involve Vita killing one of her children. Killing someone in a card game was one thing; killing your own kid was another.

Lombroso wasn’t a big believer in environment, though he did admit that growing up in a poor place, surrounded by other criminals, didn’t help your chances. But he didn’t cut the poor much slack. “If thieves are generally penniless, it is because of their extreme idleness and astonishing extravagance, which makes them run through huge sums with the greatest ease, not because poverty has driven them to theft,” he said.

It seemed obvious to me that people with misshapen heads, giant jaws, and such were more likely to be shunned by society, which would lead, inevitably, to them participating in antisocial behavior. And that because they were antisocial, chances were their kids would be, too. But Lombroso didn’t see it that way. They weren’t criminals because they looked this way and were mocked. They looked this way because they were naturally born criminals. Criminal behavior wasn’t learned and passed down, but was in the blood.

Climate, he thought, played a bigger role. Murder was more frequent in warmer climates, while theft was more prevalent in the north, where food was harder to come by.

Hunger, I knew, was a prime criminal motive. My father stole all that food from work every day to feed us. Beansie’s first foray into the criminal underworld was stealing that crate of beans. All you needed was to think back on the story of Adam and Eve and their stolen fruit.

Most of the world disregarded Lombroso’s theories, but Germany and America accepted them. The Germans used them in the study of eugenics and the Americans in drafting strict immigration laws. By the turn of the century, crime in America was on the rise and the immigrants—particularly Southern Italian immigrants—were taking the fall.

Thanks in good part to that 1911 congressional report and to Lombroso, the United States passed the Immigration Act of 1924, more or less ending immigration for Southern Italians and Eastern European Jews. After the turn of the century, around two hundred thousand Italian immigrants were pouring into the country every year. After 1924, only four thousand were allowed in each year.

A drop of over 90 percent.

By this time, the Italian government was happy to stanch the flow. Emigration had devastated the small landowners, who were unable to find young men to work the land—since most of them had left for the Americas.

Wages doubled in Southern Italy for farmers, who also demanded better food. Because of the exodus, many of the small landowners either had to work the land themselves or abandon it, since they were making hardly enough to pay the land tax.

The situation led one politician from Reggio in Calabria to tell the U.S. congressional commission that emigration from Italy had gotten out of control. He regretted, he said, that Columbus had ever discovered America.